High Speed impressions

[weirdingway]

It is so not true that it's necessary to have both this and Getaway. This was awesome back in the day, but now it seems primitive and dated. Sure its an important piece of pinball history, but like King Kong revolutionized special effects in motion pictures, compared to Avatar it looks like crap. So is it with this table, which like SS, was the best table of its day, but that day has long passed. Had they released Getaway first, which uses almost the exact same playfield, but is superior in every way, no one would want anything to do with this primitive piece of junk. Season three lays its first egg!

Well let's be fair. King Kong is completely different from Avatar in terms of content so I wouldn't rest on that analogy. I still bought Black Hole despite it not being as pretty as say MM.

I suppose that could be their route, but wouldn't that just work on praying on ignorance of those who don't know about HS2? I know fans who grew up with HS1 would likely pick it up even if HS2 was available simply for the nostalgia factor, and then you have plenty of completists whom buy every table just to have them all. I don't want anything to do with this primitive piece of junk (by comparison to HS2 only, it's a solid pin otherwise) and HS2 isn't even available so their possible trick didn't work on me.

 

[Jeff Strong]

Yes, the layout is very similar, but certainly not exact, plus the sounds are very different. They're both fantastic in their own way. I don't see why folks wouldn't enjoy them both, but at the same time, people will always find something to complain about, I guess.

 

[weirdingway]

Yes, the layout is very similar, but certainly not exact, plus the sounds are very different. They're both fantastic in their own way. I don't see why folks wouldn't enjoy them both, but at the same time, people will always find something to complain about, I guess.

My complaint is I can't play the superior version right now. I have no problem with the game having any number of pins I'm not interested in, but in this case I feel like at the very least I should be hearing from FS that the other version is right around the corner. My negativity is a bit amplified though because I didn't know Getaway was a sequel to a pin when I was a kid so at a glance I thought the screenshots I skimming was the pin I've been waiting to play for so long only to feel like I've been trolled (though certainly that's not the case).

 

[Jeff Strong]

My complaint is I can't play the superior version right now. I have no problem with the game having any number of pins I'm not interested in, but in this case I feel like at the very least I should be hearing from FS that the other version is right around the corner.

Why not enjoy what you have now? And superior is subjective. I actually like HS1 better, and not for nostalgia reasons.

 

[weirdingway]

Why not enjoy what you have now? And superior is subjective. I actually like HS1 better, and not for nostalgia reasons.

I was asking for this feedback earlier. Can you tell me why? Did they mess up the sounds in the sequel? Is there a mechanic I'm not aware of that made the first one more fun to you? You could make me a believer

 

[karl]

Primitive piece of junk, eh? All I can do is shake my head...

I actually fear I might get a whiplash after reading some of the latest posts in this thread

Great table recreation, Farsight. High Speed digital feels good!

 

[Sun Vulcan]

It's strange, but I'm a bit disappointed. I want Getaway even more now, sound and rules much more interesting...

 

[pinballchris]

I would say it is pretty easy. Outlanes are forgiving, speed is manageable, EB's are plenty. I think it is perfect for the next Tournament however.

 

[Rudy]

It's a lot easier than I expected, which either means that I'm getting much better at virtual pinball or it's an easily tuned machine.

Then again, it could just be the pinball gods being cruel to me because I only had a short amount of time to play it and had to drain balls 2 and 3, I have a horrible feeling I'll never get as good a score as that for a while.

 

[Fungi]

I've found this to be much easier than the real table due mostly to the fact that the real tables usually have a weak plunger and or upper flipper. When it first came out, I was really loving the table, but as the machines got older, I just kept having a harder and harder time getting decent scores.

 

[Buzz1126]

D*********mmmmm! I had forgotten how much FUN this table was!! It makes me want to hop in the car and run some red lights! (not reall, but I thought it sounded good at the time...)
"Yes, Officer."
"Yes, sir, they're right here."
"No sir."
"No sir."
"Yes, sir, I won't."
"Yes, sir. You too, sir."

**puts mirror sunglasses back on, pops in Sammy Hagar's "I Can't Drive 55", drops the clutch, and hits it...***

 

[superballs]

Primitive piece of junk, eh? All I can do is shake my head...

I seem to have multiquoted out of order. But i agree that this is a pretty harsh critique of a wonderfully digitized table.

Shoot, I guess I never played this version before. I thought High Speed was just a nickname people used to describe what I grew up playing called "The Getaway". Looking closer at the panel now I see "High Speed II" in a thin font in black over a dark blue background (terrible design), but playing pinball as a kid I didn't take the time to carefully look at the back panel, I just saw "The Getaway" and took that as the name as it should always be obvious what your product name is at a cursory glance. Now what I see FS has re-created is a completely inferior version that I've not personally seen.

No dot matrix display with the cool minigame, no super charger ramp, no gear shifting...it sucks. So glad I only downloaded the free version. I figured I would just play it to make sure it wasn't buggy and then a guaranteed purchase. I thought something was off though when the table loaded up, like assets were missing. And then when I saw the scores were more like the old style (I don't know what you call it, but like Funhouse and Bride of Pinbot's scoring display) I knew something was wrong.

Completely on me, of course, but I don't understand why FS would bother with an inferior version. I couldn't see anything this table had that was unique in terms of features that the second one didn't have. High Speed II (which I now know it should be called, not just what's prominently displayed on the back panel "The Getaway") is superior in every way and the only reason I could see them also doing the original is just for the sake of trying to get a complete pinball collection on the arcade.

I REALLY hope they get the actually good version of this pin because I've been waiting so long for it only to run into what felts like a belated 4/1 joke. I know people who grew up on the old version will obviously say they prefer it through the standard nostalgia filter, but I'd like to honestly hear some unbiased analysis on what this version offers that make it worth playing if both were available.

This post makes no sense.
1) If you had not seen the High Speed II portion of The Getaway, how could you have ever mistaken a game obviously titled HIGH SPEED (prominently at that) for a game where the prominent portion of the title was THE GETAWAY?

2) High Speed isn't an inferior version of the Getaway, you say this as if both games were made at the same time and High Speed was some stripped down welfare version for poor people and dummies. The Getaway is a sequel not a "superior version". It's also far from junk. It's pretty well known around here that I do in fact prefer HS2: The Getaway, in fact, I'm pretty sure that I literally am the first person to ask Farsight about releasing it, along with Eight Ball Deluxe on their facebook page, you would have to go back almost 2 years to find it. I've been waiting for it for quite some time.

The Getaway is the machine that got me into pinball. It's the first machine I ever put my initials on, and the first machine I can say I got really good at. But that doesn't make High Speed junk. It's a fast table that was revolutionary for it's time, with a simple but demanding ruleset.

Well let's be fair. King Kong is completely different from Avatar in terms of content so I wouldn't rest on that analogy. I still bought Black Hole despite it not being as pretty as say MM.

I suppose that could be their route, but wouldn't that just work on praying on ignorance of those who don't know about HS2? I know fans who grew up with HS1 would likely pick it up even if HS2 was available simply for the nostalgia factor, and then you have plenty of completists whom buy every table just to have them all. I don't want anything to do with this primitive piece of junk (by comparison to HS2 only, it's a solid pin otherwise) and HS2 isn't even available so their possible trick didn't work on me.

What you seem to have missed is that there was a poll here between High Speed and The Getaway, the Getaway won out in votes, but not by very much, it was very close. You asked for an unbiased opinion previously and I can't give you one, simply because I have a bias toward The Getaway, but I can still praise and enjoy High Speed for what it is. Now if you need dot matrix displays and toys upon toys and ramps and all that, well that's all you, but to even hint that Farsight is preying (not praying BTW) on the ignorance of people because you completely missed obvious differences is borderline trolling. Shame on you for that...tsk tsk and all that.

My complaint is I can't play the superior version right now. I have no problem with the game having any number of pins I'm not interested in, but in this case I feel like at the very least I should be hearing from FS that the other version is right around the corner. My negativity is a bit amplified though because I didn't know Getaway was a sequel to a pin when I was a kid so at a glance I thought the screenshots I skimming was the pin I've been waiting to play for so long only to feel like I've been trolled (though certainly that's not the case).

Again, somehow you missed obvious differences between the tables. Honestly, with the exception that both tables have kickouts, outer loops (like MM and MB, and at least 70% of modern tables) and a kickout hole which HS2 called the tunnel shot and and upper loop, again like a lot of other tables have. I think you are the only person who is actually surprised that HS is in fact what it is.

This was a highly requested table, sorry that you had to find out that Farsight doesn't personally cater to you and you only, and next month's table is most definitely not The Getaway either so you might want to temper your expectations as well, to stave off potential disappointment.

Now on to my opinion of the table itself.
It's not exactly as brutal as I thought it would be (talking the steam version, android is harder).
The table looks and plays great, great sound. The fake GI actually is a cool effect, I'd like to see it implemented in the other tables where it would apply.
The ball can really get zinging around the loop and the kickout from the hideout holes is dangerous fast.
The kickback is very easy to light thankfully, because it's also easy to hit that outlane.

 

[Man-Machine]

Ha, what a fast table this is. Very nice. I haven't read the instructions yet but it seems very straightforward. Good addition to an already great season.
An unavoidable thought: comparing this to Victory from roughly the same era shows how much ahead Williams was at the time.

Edit: spelling

 

[Tron]

Very good table.

 

[mpad]

Great table!!! Love the whole music and sfx. Nice lighting. Really fun.

 

[Shaneus]

I think I'd be more willing to accept/discuss people's dislikes about this game if they weren't so damn hyperbolic about it. "Primitive piece of junk"? "It sucks"? "Inferior version"?

I could've gone on and on about the absolute overreactionary disdain this game is receiving, but superballs covered it pretty well. Heaven forbid any of these people go to something like Texas Pinball Festival where a sizeable percentage of games have NO DMD whatsoever. But screw all of those games anyway. Without DMDs, they just can't be fun!

PS. Comparing High Speed and The Getaway to Addams Family and Addams Family Gold? That's hilarious, right there.

 

[Medieval_Gofers]

I desperately want to love High Speed but im finding it a little easy right now. Grand champion score on my first game and beat that on my second. Just seems like there's not much to do...it's actually very similar in rule set to Firepower tbh...shoot targets to light locks, lock ball, multiball, repeat.

I'll give the ruleset a good read, see if there's something I've missed, but right now it's just made me want the Getaway even more!

On visual pinball, they got the beacon effects by making a red light sweep over the top of the table. If Farsight could do that as well that'd be great

 

[Shaneus]

That's sort of the beauty of HS and also it's downfall in it's virtual iteration. Playing the machine in real life is quite fatiguing with the amount of nudging that's required to keep the ball in play, so even with how static the rules are, you're also fighting your ability to keep up with the game. Obviously there's no way for FS to be able to emulate that ever, but to give you an idea of how hard it is to do well on the real machine, my highest score on mine is a little over 5.5m. The only difference I have in the rules of mine is that the kickback doesn't light at the start of each ball (so if you lose it on ball one, it's not lit at the start of ball two).

Strange thing is, the table is definitely an accurate recreation of the real thing, so I'm not sure how people are getting good high scores... unless it's from nudging a lot (but not enough to get a tilt warning), which would 100% explain it.

 

[Shaneus]

After a quick play, I've worked out why it feels so much easier: Upper flipper is far too powerful. There are shots where the ball doesn't connect with the flipper until it's about 2/3 of the way in it's rotation yet the ball still flies up the ramp. IRL only on the rarest occasions would the ball go up the ramp (and even then, only barely). In this, the ball flies up there just as fast as if it was hit while it was against the flipper. If that makes sense.

It sucks, because it heavily negates the need of needing near-perfect timing to hit the ramp. It seems near-impossible for the ball to only go part way up the ramp if it's via the upper flipper (and only then, the timing has to be REALLY off for it to do so. There's a large window for a mistake with the flipper providing that much inertia to the ball).

Hope it can get fixed, because then we'd be seeing scores closer to what real machines exhibit, where anything 6m and over is an achievement. For now, I think it's safe to say we'll see scores of up to 20m in a few days.

 

[pm1109]

After a quick play, I've worked out why it feels so much easier: Upper flipper is far too powerful. There are shots where the ball doesn't connect with the flipper until it's about 2/3 of the way in it's rotation yet the ball still flies up the ramp. IRL only on the rarest occasions would the ball go up the ramp (and even then, only barely). In this, the ball flies up there just as fast as if it was hit while it was against the flipper. If that makes sense.

It sucks, because it heavily negates the need of needing near-perfect timing to hit the ramp. It seems near-impossible for the ball to only go part way up the ramp if it's via the upper flipper (and only then, the timing has to be REALLY off for it to do so. There's a large window for a mistake with the flipper providing that much inertia to the ball).

Hope it can get fixed, because then we'd be seeing scores closer to what real machines exhibit, where anything 6m and over is an achievement. For now, I think it's safe to say we'll see scores of up to 20m in a few days.

You know everything there is too know about High Speed. I think you should send Farsight an email about any any issues with this game.They will listen to you especially when you own the real game.The lighting looks superb on the pc version.Thats the biggest highlight for me.Without it I would not have been interested as much.I also played the IOS version of High Speed and its completely inferior to the pc version.I guess tablets will never match the hardware aspects of pc's